rAge 2012: Comptium overclocks a few things

06 October 2012

By Wesley Fick

Comptium’s stand is directly opposite the NAG Magazine one with the awesome arcade machines that you can win. Just in case you didn’t hear it already, you can ask the pretty NAG Minions for a few coins and try your luck at posting some high scores to win one of these fantastic machines. But back on topic, Comptium had overclocker dRweEz take the reins over the last two days and I spent some time picking up how they’d done with the Asrock Z77 OC Formula board.

Day one’s efforts didn’t go unrewarded, with dRweEz quickly finding the general limits of the hardware he was working with. After twenty minutes, he had the Core i7-3770K sitting pretty at far below zero and trotting along at 6.8GHz. The G.Skill RAM had to be dropped to 1400MHz for system stability, running at 10-12-12-31 timings, a little loose than normal to allow for better flexibility. Super PI 1M calculations came to 5.44 seconds, a great finish for such a highly stressed processor. But that wasn’t the end of it.

During day 2, the final limits of the Core i7 chip were realised, hitting a stratospheric 7.058GHz, a new local record. It didn’t end there, Super PI 1M runs ended in 5.234 seconds and PI 32M runs completed in 4:54:734 seconds, another local record. Its clear from the scores and the relative ease at which they were gained that this board is definitely a contender for the overclocking crown held by Gigabyte’s Z77-UD3H. Its certainly going to make a strong case for itself in my next series of System Builder articles this month.

I’ll be reporting back later with the results from the PNY Geforce GTX660 Ti testing. So far its an impressive feat and Comptium owner Christie Lombard is certainly happy with the results. Speaking to me in an impromptu interviw during the overclocking sessions, he revealed that he was the first distributor to start bringing the Asrock brand back in after their quiet period with the Intel Nehalem and first-generation Core i3 lineup.

Said Christie, “I was one of the first companies who actually went up to Asrock and asked to distribute their products. A year ago it wasn’t a popular name in South Africa because the brand just disappeared, the same way Foxconn did. After seeing their success I realised that this is what gamers and enthusiasts wanted – more options and potentially better performance at a lower price. So I started bringing boards in little by little and slowly the brand built up its popularity again.”

Comptium isn’t the only distributor bringing in the brand these days – Corex and TVR are also local distributors now, and the enthusiasm people have towards the name just keeps on picking itself up. I include them myself in my System Builders articles and the value for money is really something to be reckoned with.

Going through the rest of the stand, a number of Asrock boards were on display, as well as several sets of G.Skill RAM and the new Be Quiet CPU cooler and power supplies. I’ll be filling in more info on those later as well. In the meantime, you can gawk at everything in the gallery and maybe swing past the stand to have a look for yourself.